since a normal disk can maybe do 80Mbyte/sec on a sunny day while going
downhill.. it looks like your benchmark is measuring something else
(like VM caching policy).... if you want to measure disk throughput you
might want to consider using another benchmark; I tend to use tiobench
(tiobench.sf.net) for things like this...

Thanks for the info. The results produced by tiobench were definitely
better matched.
best,
-M